23 March 2006

A grant on which I was a co-PI gt rejected this week. Another to add to the pile. But I received notice of a request for applications in April that I might try for, so it's time to line up another kick at the can.

19 March 2006

The day after Crash won the best picture Oscar, Sounds Like Canada replayed an old interview with writer / director Paul Haggis. (I was aware of his work without being aware of it: he was a lead creative force on Due South.) He said something very, very, very interesting. Paraphrasing, he said, "I'm not interested in a project unless there's a real chance that I might fail."

He said he quit making television because failure wasn't a very real prospect for him any more.

Another little anecdote on ths topic of failure come from Jules Feiffer. He had a cartoon where basically, people come and take stuff away from a person, who doesn't object to this. Because, when they've found you out you're a fake, why bother objecting? He apparently said that a lot of people related to that cartoon, because they never had a significant failure in their work or life. Feiffer had many failures -- Broadway plays closing first night or some such. You move on.

I think many people are governed by fear when they have to give presentations. Performance anxiety, butterflies in the stomach, frog in the throat, or just good old fashioned stage fright. Hence, they fall back on the same back habits that they see everyone else doing. Putting up title slides. Using coloured backgrounds. Sticking in tables with teeny tiny text that nobody can read.

In the “cosmic coincidence” category today, the cable station Bravo is showing the Inside the Actor's Studio episode with Robin Williams. Unfortunately, it’s the short version – only an hour. There's a longer, 90 minute version, and I would pay good money to see an uncut version of the whole evening, which ran over five hours, according to host James Lipton. I watch it whenever it’s on, because it inspires my presentations and lectures.

And at this point, you may be thinking, “Eh?”

“Come on, you're a scientist, you have to give technical talks on biology. Williams is... you know... funny.” And I freely admit, at first glance, the two don’t meet anywhere near as often as they should. There's several lessons I take from watching Williams.

Nobody ever complains that a talk was “too funny.” Humor is one of the most powerful tools any speaker has. Most humor involves drawing unexpected connections, anyone who laughs has to be thinking and attending and engaged. It can be a great way to check that people are following the words coming out of your mouth. For instance, when I teach protein structure, I often use a little chain of paper clips to represent a protein. Sometimes, while I'm manipulating it at the front of class, it falls apart, and I immediately say, “Whoops! Hydrolysis – did you see the water?” Now, most people reading this will probably go, “I don't get it.” Which is perfectly understandable, you don't have the context to make the connection. But in the context of the lecture, where I've explained what hydrolysis is, it can be funny. Maybe not hysterical, but funny enough that I get laughs with it. If people laugh at jokes related to the content of the talk, I know people are understanding the technical material.

A lot of people warn against trying to be funny in a technical talk, and I don't know why. People say, “Oh, the joke might bomb, and it can be awkward.” If you’ve ever watched every comedian, not everything that comes out is funny. They move on.

One caveat on using humour during a presentation. Don’t just tell a joke just to make a joke. Tell a joke to make a point. The humour should relate to the material. As always, this is particularly true when your talk is tightly timed. That’s probably the main difference between humour in a presentation versus humour in improvisational comedy: you are slightly more confined. That said, many theatre sport games revolve around restricting what you can say or do, and the joy is to find how far you can go within those barriers.

Robin Williams also demonstrates that enthusiasm is contagious. Whenever you’re presenting, you have to find passion, energy, that personal connection to the material.

Another lesson I get from watching Williams is the power of improvisation. An important part of a talk is not just putting information out to your audience, but picking up on cues from your surroundings, and running with it. As Harlan Ellison once said in an interview, “The overriding message of all art… is ‘Pay attention.’” And presentations are an art, so pay attention!

This will sound contradictory, but I think spontaneity is a skill. It can be learned. You can plan for, practice, and rehearse spontaneity.

One of the things I did as a high school student and as an undergraduate was a little bit of acting, which was very valuable to me when I got into graduate school and started giving presentations. I knew how to project my voice, for instance. Another thing that I’m sure most actors will be familiar with is that the first thing that happens is that you have to learn your lines. As you become more familiar with your lines, though, an interesting thing happens. You start to play with them, because you reach the point where you know them so well. You can veer off, try something a little different, and not lose the plot because you have rehearsed. One reason so many talks are so stilted and canned is not that people rehearse too much – talks are stilted because people don’t rehearse enough. They are rigidly following lines, like an actor beginning to learn a new play. The slightest problem throws them off course.

One easy way to “plan for spontaneity” is to have certain lines that work in several different situations. For instance, I can always get a laugh by saying about some process, particularly one that seems a little boring or obscure, “It’s a great party trick... if you're ever at a party with no chicks or booze.” (Stolen without shame from Drew Carey, who used it all the time on Whose Line Is It Anyway?) Talk’s lagging a little? Throw in the party trick line. But it’s brilliant, because it’s so multi-purpose that you can use it without deliberately planning to use it.

Another example of how you can plan to be spontaneous is to make sure your talk is shorter than the allotted time. That way, you can take an extra 30 seconds to say that cogent example that just popped into your head. If your time is 15 minutes, and your talk is always 15 minutes, you cannot deviate without going over time. Leave yourself the breathing room to allow for those fruitful deviations.

So yes, I strongly believed spontaneity is a skill that can be, if not learned, facilitated or not hindered. I believe humour is a skill that can be learned. I think I'm much funnier now than I used to be, and I think that's largely because of having to teach. As you become better prepared, the more able you are to make stuff up as you go.

For instance, a couple of days ago I gave my Brain Awareness Week talk (which went very well, thank you for asking). At the start, I introduced what Brain Awareness Week was, and, on the spot, I said something like, “This runs all this week, so if you're not aware of your brain by the end of tonight, you still have Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to become aware of it.” Didn’t plan it, but it successfully got a laugh. And I was able to keep on track because I knew where I was in the talk and what I had to say next. If I didn't put in enough thought beforehand, I might have lost the plot: “Now, what was I saying?”

But preparation alone doesn’t get you to that level of performance that Robin Williams achieves, which he calls “legalized insanity.” You have to trust your creative impulses and not censor. The good news is that if you do that in a presentation, you are allowed a very large amount of leeway in behaviour that you don’t get while walking around in Wal-Mart (say). (Hence, the “legalized insanity.”) Now that I lecture a lot, one of the things I’ve realized is that it’s difficult to go too far. Forget about trying to present an “appropriate” facade. I do try to avoid being mean-spirited, but otherwise, I feel very comfortable saying whatever comes to mind.

Another talk that I find extremely, extremely inspiring is director Robert Rodriguez's commentary to Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams. Trust me, whatever you think of the movie, that DVD is worth renting just to listed to the commentary track. On it, Rodriguez talks a lot about his creative process. One of the lessons he said he learned was that his creativity never let him down. He faced problems like needing a song when no composer was available. Rather than saying, “I don’t know how to do that,” he just tackled it and trusted that he could come up with a solution.

And when all of those things start clicking, that's the best. Some people call it flow, some people call it their game face, some people call it being in the zone. And it doesn't seem to matter what the situation is -- the way you get to that is through lots of initial preparation, which gives you the freedom to pay attention and adjust to new situations.

It makes giving a talk. So. Much. Fun.

I've really come to enjoy my lectures, because I can go a little crazy. I can tell jokes. I know I will have a chance to engage in just a little of that “legalized insanity.”

11 March 2006

I spent a good chunk of today working on a public lecture for this Thursday, whcih I'm giving as part of Brain Awareness Week. Because it's for a general public talk, I can try some things that I'd get shot if I were to try in a lecture or at a conference. I'm going to try to give a Lessig style presentation. It'll be fun to try.

09 March 2006

I finally managed to check off a couple of prominent items on my “to do” list. First, a manuscript I was hoping would go out around New Year’s is sitting patiently in the outbound mailbox waiting to be picked up on its way to a scientific journal. If I can get this out by the end of this year, that would make 2006 among my most productive publishing years ever. Second, I sat down with my colleague Anita this morning and we roughed out what we want to do for our new graduate course, Evolutionary Theory, which we’re going to teach this summer. It’ll be an interesting experience. Not fifteen weeks. Twenty-four days. Twenty-four days of intense teaching action.

Meanwhile, I was actually amazed to see a crustacean making the world news! Kiwa hirsuta is a newly described deep sea decapod – if I understand right, it’s a hydrothermal vent species. It’s blind and furry. It appears to be a squat lobster, which is not a well-known group to most people. But it just goes to show how engaging one good picture of a cool animal really is.

04 March 2006

Rejected by the NSF again. This is the third time we've submitted a proposal to the Research Experience for Undergraduates Sites program. It seems like every time we make revisions, the reviews come back no better or maybe even worse.

Other lousy news: Our department was vandalized over the weekend. Only one room so far, the downstairs student lounge, but yeesh.

Ah well. Time to work on a manuscript instead of a proposal. We have a pause in lectures, anyway, that gives me a little time to do such. We have arrived at that peculiarly American phenomenon known as "spring break."

Some things I've been looking at. I just discovered the Creating Passionate Users blog and love it. I particularly like the recent posts on How to be an expert and how Dignity is deadly. Also Guy Kawasaki's blog, which I was led to by his excellent talk on innovation. Although it is geared at businesses, I think there's a lot for academics to take away from it. For instance, Guy talks about the idiocy and generic nature of mission statements. Most universities have mission statements. Heck, I was asked to write one for our graduate program. But I think he's on the mark with his alternative, which is to make a three to four word mantra instead of a mission statement. My mantra as the grad coordinator in my department is, "Springboard students' careers."